Chemotherapy can kill cancer cells if it can stop them from dividing. The faster the division of cells, the more hope of zapping them and dissolving the tumor. I no longer had any tumor or cancer cells. The chemo was going after the possibility of cells: any lone soldier cell that brazenly began forming would be zapped in the act of creation, or commit cell suicide, something called self-death or apoptosis. I was lucky that my cancer was the kind in which cells did rapidly divide, the kind that chemo was most effective at killing. But sadly it couldn’t distinguish those cells from the healthy ones. It attacked them where they grew the fastest: in the blood, the mouth, the hair, the stomach, and the bowels. My stomach and colon were already vulnerable from the months of infection, which is why on day four, my whole lower body shut down, literally. My stoma and the surrounding area had already proved to be highly sensitive and would swell whenever I ate the wrong food or was even a little anxious. Then I wouldn’t be able to anchor the bag properly on the swollen surface and it would fall off or break open. But now something else was going on. Well, actually nothing was going on. That was the problem. My poop and my body had come to a complete standstill. It was as if my body had been scared into shock and had died, even though I still seemed to be breathing. I began to get sick, really sick, nauseous and dizzy and weak. My goddaughter, Adisa, and my niece Katherine, had volunteered to take care of their auntie godmother for the weekend. I didn’t want to worry them, so I really tried to ignore what was happening, to eat things that would make the nausea better. But all that did was further clog the drain. My stomach began to swell around the stoma and I felt worse, sicker, vomiting and spinning until sometime very early in the morning I found myself crawling on all fours, moaning in pain. My bag was empty. Before I knew it, I was back in the hospital, strapped to an IV. I had a serious obstruction—an obstacle, a block, a barricade.
I was back in the room with the tree. This time I felt lonely and sad, deeply sad. Some part of me didn’t want to cooperate or move forward.
The tree seemed to mock my self-pity. I was raging, I was totally exhausted by myself, exhausted by my desperate fear of vanishing into ordinary. I was at the end of my body’s road. Everything had stopped inside me, even tears. I passed out.
When I woke up my bag was full and life, it seemed, was coursing through me. The tree had worked its magic. What I didn’t know was that the tree was actually inside me and saving my life. It turns out that Taxol, one of my chemo chemicals, is found in the bark of the ancient yew tree. Even better, the Taxol is made from the needles of the tree, so the tree does not have to be destroyed. Taxol functions to stabilize the cell structure so solidly that killer cells cannot divide and multiply.
It was a tree that was calming and protecting me, fortifying my cell structure so it was safe from attack. I had finally found my mother.
SCAN
I WAS THAT GIRL WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD, OR HOW POT SAVED ME LATER
It seems a lifetime ago that I smoked pot on my way to school, sitting in a tiny sports car driven by a huge guy named W. I would be wrecked by homeroom, starving for munchies by second period. W, the son of a famous sports star, and I had gone from being a rising football player (him) and an overly enthusiastic, slightly desperate cheerleader (me) to a stoned-out dealer and a hippie chick in about three weeks. The transition was seamless. I knew that W, who reminded me of Lenny in Of Mice and Men (those huge hands), had a crush on me, so I was happy to be in his car every morning, sharing his stash. For my sixteenth birthday he gave me a tin filled with an ounce of grass and hundreds of black beauties, which kept me awake for the rest of the year, compulsively talking and constantly licking my lips. I did better on speed than on pot, which made me paranoid, and I was already paranoid. When I smoked pot, all I did was apologize. I’m stoned. I’m sorry. But that didn’t stop me. I loved arriving at school, stepping out of W’s incredibly cool car in a cloud of reefer, sunglasses concealing my bloodshot eyes, as Janis or the Grateful Dead blared in the background, and wobbling onto the plush green lawn in my torn blue jeans and Frye boots. I had no desire to be present. I despised Scarsdale. I was an outcast from the get-go. Never pretty enough, rich enough, thin enough. Never having the right friends, house, or clothes. The ’60s, well, really, drugs, freed me. I got stoned and stopped giving a shit. I see now it was a momentary solution. Drugs and booze saved my life until they started to destroy it. From the first drink something hard, taut, and wired released in me. I was suddenly fun and funny—the life of the party. I was that wild girl, the one everyone secretly thought would be dead by twenty-one. The one who always pushed the edge, drove the car too fast with no hands on the steering wheel at midnight, the one who dared the boys and, when they were afraid, led the way leaping off the high quarry ledge, the one who got drunk with much older guys in dark joints that no one else even knew existed in a place like Scarsdale. The one who dated Billy, the heroin addict who was at least seven years older. With his Harley and his cool black motorcycle jacket, he would pick me up every day and we would spend the afternoon at his house, Billy nodding off, me mad methadrine talking. I was that girl who couldn’t stop having sex. Sex relieved the pain and I was almost always in pain, so I needed a lot of sex. My life was spent managing the pain. I did heroin the night before my French SATs and was still so stoned the next day, I drew a huge black X through the entire exam. I was that girl who got arrested for stealing a huge bag of sunglasses from Genung’s department store in White Plains for my friends or my wished-for friends, in order to ratchet up my popularity. I was that sad, wild girl, who was clearly the outcome of something that had happened or was happening to her inside her house, but in those days no one knew the signs or would even admit that such a thing was even possible. I was that girl who ran away after my father found me on the phone with Beth Post, my girl crush, the most beautiful blond girl (also a theme throughout my life). My father went crazy, humiliated me on the phone, called me horrible names for hours, whipped my legs so hard with his belt there were welts, then told me he was sending me to a school for juvenile delinquents and threw me in the basement to sleep with the dog. I was that girl who took off in the middle of the night and walked miles in the dark (diving into bushes to dodge police) to the other side of Scarsdale, where I snuck into my best friend Ginny’s house, up into her attic bedroom, and woke her up pacing, out of breath. I was that girl who slipped out every week and drove with W and his hippie friends to Manhattan to the Fillmore East (with at least a pound of hashish under the seat) to hear Grace Slick or Tina Turner. I was ready for anything. I was that wild girl who never thought about consequences. When I was seventeen and my parents were out of town, I flew to Berkeley, California, from New York and met Jimmy, the coke dealer. I spent two days testing coke and did so much, I had no ability to tell one crop from another. All I remember is eating a cooked artichoke dipped in warm butter. I flew back with a pound of pure coke (a thousand dollars’ worth) in the pocket of Billy’s black motorcycle jacket, which he had loaned me for courage. Imagine trying to get through today’s security with a pound of coke in your pocket. I was a suicide girl on a radical mission to get out—out of Scarsdale, whitebourgeoissocialclimbingshoppingmallstifling, out of my family, out of my body—and drugs were the means of transport.
I was that girl in college who lived half naked, an exaggerated exhibitionist, an out bisexualalmostlesbian, guilt-tripping and seducing every straight woman I knew, sleeping with my roommate during the week and with men on the weekends when her boyfriend came to stay. I could never seem to land in either court. My hunger for flesh and touch, breasts and penises, mouths, love, and sex was massive, urgent, and indiscriminate. I was that girl who became a bartender in a redneck bar in Vermont and brought booze to all my literature classes. I was the one who slept with most of my professors and thought that was simply part of the course. I was that girl who gave the commencement speech at college graduation and spoke out against racism and sexism and then sat down in my seat in my cap
and gown and drank a bottle of Jack Daniel’s passed to me in a brown paper bag.
Later, when I’d spent all of the thousand dollars that my father gave me at graduation (in about two weeks), I was that wild girl turned mundane tragedy. I was that girl who fell into my twenties unglamorously and compulsively promiscuous, drunk, and weepy, who ended up working in a Mafia after-hours club sleeping with a delicious-smelling hit man, waitressing in black tights and an emerald tuxedo top with cheap diamond buttons. I was that girl who woke up one night from a blackout to find Frankie, one of the good-looking Mafia owners of the joint, banging my head against the bar, ripping off my necklaces, while the other owners watched without even thinking of intervening. I was that girl who went out every night praying someone, anyone, would finally put me out of my misery. It was on the hard ground of the Old San Juan airport parking lot in Puerto Rico, having just been beaten up by my then boyfriend, eventual husband, that for whatever reason, and to this day it confounds me, I got down on my knees and swore to a God I didn’t believe in that if I were granted the return of my mind, I would change. As I gripped the broken high heel of my shoe, and as cheap black makeup dripped down my swollen, drunken cheeks, I knew I needed to offer something huge because I had fallen so far. I was that wild girl who had totally lost my way, squandered my talents and gifts, alienated those who loved and believed in me, betrayed lovers and wives (an entrenched pattern born of an early love triangle—seducer father, perfect mother). I was that pathetic girl who had spent those central formative years frying my brain molecules. I had lost huge opportunities because of my arrogance, defiance, and righteousness. Putting down the bottle and the drugs was the hardest thing I ever did. At twenty-three I was sober, totally broke, and regularly visiting the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village with anxiety attacks. I didn’t have a dollar to my name. I didn’t even have a bank account until much later. I lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on Christopher Street for $120 a month and sold Avon to drag queens on the block. I taught writing in Harlem at a school for pregnant girls where full-bellied teenagers spent most of the class sucking their thumbs, trying to calm their poor terrorizedsoontobemotherwithoutaclueordesire nerves. I had nothing with which to self-medicate. There was no way to silence the avalanche of self-hatred, criticism, and fear that had been unleashed once I put the booze and drugs away. I was addicted to Tab and Vantage cigarettes and was a serious vegan, which meant I was eating pickled mushrooms and getting very little protein for my very troubled brain. Honestly, I don’t remember eating. But I didn’t drink or drug.
Now, thirty-two years later, pot was the way through chemo and I needed a way through. The most surprising people were instantly out copping for me. As most of my friends in my present life had never known me at my lowest or been with me when I drank or drugged, there was much excitement at coming over to watch me get high. It was theater. It was sport. I was suddenly a pot-smoking, meat-eating bald person with a bag. A holiday. Of sorts.
SCAN
RIDING THE LION
Sue: “Ride the lion with all of the strength and love that you have found in your community. Although this anguish is very lonely, there is a new infant being born, in a community of love, protection, tenderness, and ferocious caregiving. We are all around you with our blessings. You are here with me. The life force in you is being released. Kali is being purged from your cells, so that your cells run clean of cancer, and your selves run clean of the projected not-you badness that has riddled you all of your life. Washed clean, you are finding your original goodness.”
SCAN
CHEMO DAY FIVE
Vagina pain, deep throbbing vagina pain
Crushing bone ache
Feet no longer feel the floor
Desire to die while you are at the height of fighting death.
Desire to vomit when you know the poison you want to eject is supposed to be saving your life.
Bag stinks of toxic fumes
Burning
Salem
Witches
Cells, exploding emoticons, committing suicide right and left
Loss of will
Exhausted but no sleep.
THINGS NOT TO THINK ABOUT ON DAY FIVE:
Global warming
Six million dead in the Congo
The pointlessness and expense of the UN
Garbage, where it goes
How much women spend on beauty products
Rush Limbaugh
Bankers
Health care in America
Friends whose cancer just came back
My mother’s loneliness
C never calling even though I know he knows
BP
UNICEF
Larry Summers
Liberals
Republicans
Postracial anything
Afghanistan
Drones
Transsexual bashing
Polar bears drowning
Birds falling out of the sky
Climate change deniers
The bodies of decomposed women alone in the Congolese forest.
One cannot underestimate the importance of pot.
SCAN
ON THE COUCH NEXT TO ME
My sister’s existence utterly threatened my existence. I will never recover from the horrendous moment of her birth. I was already a scrappy two-year-old fighting for even the remotest glance from my blond beauty-queen mother. My sister could not exist. It was unbearable. So I made her disappear. I am not proud of this. She became a blur, a blob, a smear of existence—something that on occasion appeared out of the corner of my eye and then, with a blink, was made to go away. Of all the things I have done in my life, I am most ashamed of this. I have no doubt it is why I became a feminist—to somehow right this wrong. The concept of sisterhood was at such odds with the almost homicidal competitiveness that lived in me. Our parents, Chris and Arthur, sucked the life and air out of every room and party. Now there would be two of us fighting for what wasn’t there.
I do not remember having outright murder fantasies about my sister, but I do remember the annihilating rage—a rage that once exploded in me so forcefully that I threw her under a chair and kicked her.
In the family hierarchy my sister was on the lowest rung. This both protected her and rendered her invisible. My father had all the oxygen, the resources, the money, the power, the charm, and the rest of us lived off the fumes. The closer you were to him, the more chance you had of breathing, but the proximity also meant serious danger. Who knows what makes each of us who we are. I got the idea wrongly or rightly that my survival was based on being heard, being seen even if it meant being abused and attacked. In securing the spotlight, I was anything but sisterly. Invisibility was the greatest enemy. This idea became the architectural framework of my life.
It took stage IIIB/IV cancer, a shamanic cleansing, and exorcising of the original narrative to allow me to begin to see that perhaps this story was not my story.
Of all the destructive things my father did—and there were many—nothing was as devastating and long-lasting as the way he divided us and turned us on each other. This was his deepest and most sustained legacy. I see how the division plays out everywhere, how this early destructive mutation of the family, just like that of a cancer cell, determines the psychic and social patterns of our existence. The world seems to be constructed on empires born of these mutations—of poor pitted against poor, ethnic group against ethnic group, elevating one group over another—a seduction that keeps the powerful in place. What if we weren’t so susceptible to being the adored, the most, the cherished, the winner?
Now Lu was on the couch next to me, putting a washcloth on my head, rolling me joints (turned out she was as good at this as she is at everything), and reminding me to breathe, to take the Xanax, to stop reading the book on genocide. She had, it turned out, grown up and made a valuable life, devoted herself to her husband and daughter, done extraordinary work in the world. She had
become a major somebody. And for whatever reason, she was here, taking care of me. I had been given a reprieve and so I shut up. I listened. I asked her questions and I was sincerely curious about the answers. At first I tolerated her substantial existence, but as the days passed I came to rejoice in it.
It was fragile, our new beginning. I was terrified of blowing it. I learned to be still, some days to do very little. I would be burning. We would eat a chicken, look at handbags online, play with her new iPad, cry at ridiculously bad movies, carefully and sporadically talk about Arthur and Chris. Lu had a threshold. I learned to respect it. I was not better or braver for being a tragedy magnet. Lu’s presence, her simple, soft-skinned, maternal-sister presence was a healing. My sister and I, on an island called Manhattan, with my body on fire, nausea racing through me, fell in love. That’s the only way I can describe it. We found another direction for our attention, not up toward the impossible father or out toward the unreachable mother, but across to each other.
SCAN
I LOVE YOUR HAIR, OR THE LAST TIME I SAW MY MOTHER
I feed her chocolate ice cream and want to believe there was a time she did this for me. I have no memory of her putting food in my mouth. I hate her. Here I am, having climbed out of my chemo cocoon to fly south to feed her chocolate ice cream. Here I am, again taking care of her, hoping she might one day feel compelled to take care of me. An old shrink used to say, “You think if you paste arms on her, eventually she will hug you.” I am shocked at my rage, shocked that she didn’t pause when I entered her hospital room just now to say, “My god, you came. You flew here in the middle of chemotherapy to be with me.” Instead, in her gradually descending dementia, she talks about how much she loves my hair. She has told all the nurses that I will set a fashion with my hair and it will be the rage in New York.